Gets the job done for the price
Written: Nov 20 '99
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Consistent service, good features for price
Cons: Newsgroup server is spotty
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| collin_ong's Full Review: Softcom (Sacramento, CA) |
Softcom.net is a local ISP serving the Sacramento, California and surrounding area. I was looking for a low monthly cost ISP just to provide home dial-up connection to the net, since I have fast net access at work and also have a separate hosting provider for my own website domain (http://collin.org). I also wanted a locally-based service since I thought it would be easier to get tech support, although, as a new old-bie, I didn't expect to need much.
I found Softcom.net through a combination of seaching on the net and a recommendation from a friend and am starting my second year of service with them. Frankly, the low monthly price of $89/year (at that time) was the biggest draw. Softcom offers most of the expected features from an ISP: 56k dial-up access, 5 email accounts, 50MB of web space, and newsgroups.
I signed up by phone and the people were very helpful and gave me all the info I needed to get setup over the phone and had my account setup by the next day.
Dial-up connections are pretty reliable and I get consistent 44kbps connects from my home, with occasional 45.3kbps. Busy signals are rare and I only hit them in the early evening every few months or so and when I do, I can usually get through within 15 minutes of auto-dialing. Spontaneous disconnects don't happen that often, but happen in spurts, especially when you've just got in through busy signals.
Email service is reliable and consistent, although I'm not a heavy user of email at home. I haven't tried setting up additional accounts.
I also haven't tried using the web site that comes with the account, because I have my own domain hosted by www.autobahn.org.
My only real complaint about softcom's service is the newsgroup (nntp) server. I'm an old-time news junkie from way back and softcom's newsgroup server is not up to snuff. The article retention is very small, so in high volume groups, you'll miss articles if you don't check ever day. The articles that come in are rather sporadic and inconsistent. This is hard to pick up in discussion based groups, but is readily apparent in binary groups where large numbers of sequential posts make it easy to see. I've complained to softcom. They said that their news service is outsourced to one of the big backbone providers and that they had put in some complaints, but the service hasn't improved and I've since given up using it, in favor of deja.com (which is also going down).
Since I know how to setup a ISP account pretty much blindfolded, I haven't had to try their tech support much so I can't comment about that.
Since I joined, the price has gone up to $9.95/month with no setup charge for annual subscriptions. ($14.95/month with $20 setup for month-to-month)
In conclusion, softcom provides consistent service with good features for a good price that I can't complain much about.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
collin_ong
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Member: Collin Ong
Location: Sacramento, California
Reviews written: 97
Trusted by: 47 members
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